Mostly correct. The only slight correction is that they can delete posts and block users from their own communities. So hypothetically, if User@serverone.lm posts starts being super rude on a community in servertwo.lm, then the admins of servertwo.lm can delete posts in their instance and/or block the user from participating there. That does not stop User@serverone.lm from participating in their own instance or any other.
The defederation thing is very much a last resort. If EVERYONE in serverone.lm is causing problems, and the admins of serverone.lm refuse to do anything, then the admins of servertwo.lm might decide it's not worth the hassle to ban individuals and ban the whole instance.
More power to ya. I like the ruleset here, but that's the glorious thing about Lemmy: don't like the rules of your instance? Go to one that works better for you.
That would go against the concept in a pretty big way. The entire idea of federation is that each instance owner has control over their own instance, and people should (once they get a handle on how things work) move to an instance where they like the rules and admins.
If users of an instance start brigading around the fediverse and being assholes, and the admins of that instance refuse to take action, other instances can choose to block that instance as a whole (defederation) as a last resort. A user getting dropped into an instance like that, full of assholes and isolated from the rest of the network, would be way worse than just some initial confusion.
Also, should mention that the devs have been very vocal that they want to design the system in such a way that they can't control it, but each admin & user has full autonomy rather than centralised control.
Nope. You can subscribe/post/comment on any community on any instance. There is one small seam though: if you're the first person to subscribe from your instance, you need to put in the full URL of the community (https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming, for example) to pull it into your instance.
After that, everybody on the same instance as you will see it when searching for communities just like it was local.
EDIT: Oh, forgot to mention: make sure the search is set to "All", not "Communities" when you do this.
Currently, the easiest way to find communities on remote servers to subscribe to is the community browser. I'm not sure how this problem could be solved technically in future, but yeah, discoverability is hard atm.
I'm a massive fan of Paradox Interactive, and play almost all their stuff. Crusader Kings 3, Victoria 3, Hearts of Iron 4 and Stellaris (in that order).
Yeah man, I'm in the same boat on feeling excited for the possibilities here. I'm tired as shit after a hard weekend, and I'm still trying to answer as many basic questions that are within my knowledge as possible :))
On the confusion part, yeah, there will be some adjustment for everyone (thankfully I had a 3-day head start). Just like people know that support@gmail.com and support@totallygmailtrustmebro.com are 2 different servers, people are gonna need to learn to look at which server a community is on
No, because being on a different server does not impede you in the slightest from subbing, posting and commenting in the more popular one. Think of it as the difference between /r/gaming and /r/truegaming. Same subject, different communities.
Unfortunately, flairs aren't implemented yet. It's in the GitHub issues, but considering Lemmy just grew 12-fold overnight, they're obviously focusing on optimization :))
To answer the question, communities are server specific. There are 2 separate gaming communities on lemmy.ml and beehaw.org that I know of, and probably more by now.
About needing better documentation, I could not agree more! It's very understandable considering that just 3 days ago this was a place with 1k users at peak and 2 devs plugging away at improving the framework. This is an open source project, so be the change you want to see (not directed specifically at you, that's for everyone). We can make this whatever we want, but people need to put in work. Been trying to answer as many questions as I can reasonably answer for a few hours now :)